All Tesla dealers are corporate owned, they are not independent dealers like all other car companies.

It's suspicious behavior. Potentially criminal. This is far from clear fraud. That doesn't mean it isn't fraud, that's why there's an investigation of course.

There's an actual reasonable explanation here that doesn't require a bunch of mental gymnastics, just the regular corporate "we do shit when we want to" mentality and lenient reimbursement requirements, despite what some rabid and foaming at the mouth haters want to believe.

That 713 million was freely available to anyone who cared to make EVs and scale them, for the purpose of helping make them more affordable so the companies could scale, and they had just as much time as Tesla to do it once there was a wake up call with the Model S.

The government offered the money, and Tesla executed effectively to take advantage of it.

Short of this illegal trade war, there isn't really a way to not fund a specific company without putting a equal cap on everyone, such as the original 200k car 7500 USD rebate that used to exist or else it'd violate trade rules.

GM made 200k bolts for example before they dropped the ball and maxed out the US $7500 rebate.

So the best you could ever expect is something like vehicles under price xyz, and up to xxx thousand vehicles sold.

All bets are off though in a trade war.

Teslas have been the most popular EVs on the market, so it makes sense that the majority of credits went to them prior to this current bullshit. And it's not just subsidizing them, it's subsidizing the buyers as well.

That's not to excuse the fraud or Musk in general. Subsidizing EVs was a way to replace a lot of ICE cars and put less polluting vehicles on the road, and it did that. Some of the limits for subsidies were pretty dumb though. Like you could get the rebate on a model with a lower capacity battery, but the higher capacity battery would push you out of qualification.